Profile: Husein Haqqani

Husein Haqqani was a participant or observer in the following events:

Hamid Gul, Nawaz Sharif, and Osama bin Laden conspire to assassinate Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Husein Haqqani, a Pakistani journalist who claims to have been involved in the plot, will later say that ISI Director Hamid Gul contacted Osama bin Laden, who was then known to provide financial support to Afghan mujaheddin, to pay for a coup/assassination of Bhutto. Gul also brings Nawaz Sharif, then the governor of Punjab province and a rival of Bhutto, into the plot. Bin Laden agrees to provide $10 million on the condition that Sharif transforms Pakistan into a strict Islamic state, which Sharif accepts. [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 193-194] Bhutto is not assassinated at this time, but bin Laden allegedly helps Sharif replace Bhutto one year later (see October 1990).

Husein Haqqani, an aide to Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, tells her that a planned trip to North Korea at the request of nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan to facilitate nuclear co-operation between the two countries (see December 29, 1993 and Shortly After) is a bad idea and she should not go. Haqqani will later say: “North Korea was an outlaw state, with few morals or qualms about trading in anything illicit and it was at loggerheads with the US. I told her the military and Khan were trying to trick her and that we should not be doing arms deals with [North Korea]. But she ignored me and asked me to accompany her. I cried off. I let a colleague go in my place. I let him think I was giving him a chance when I was actually watching my own back. All I kept thinking was, what happens many years down the line when this trip to North Korea is gone over? Such a thing could ruin a career. There was this bad smell about it.” [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 245]

Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto visits North Korea after being asked to do so by nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan to help co-operation between the two countries on nuclear weapons and delivery systems (see Shortly Before December 29, 1993 and Shortly Before December 29, 1993). Speech - At a formal dinner with North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, Bhutto says: “Nuclear non-proliferation should not be used as a pretext for preventing states from exercising fully their right to acquire and develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes geared to their economic and social development.” She adds: “Pakistan is committed to nuclear non-proliferation both at the global and regional level. It is not fair to cast doubts on Pakistan’s interests and to subject Pakistan to discriminatory treatment.” Deal - Bhutto then asks Kim for blueprints for missiles that can deliver Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in a potential strike on India. Kim is surprised, but Bhutto emphasizes that “We need those missiles.” Kim agrees and proposes setting up technical teams, giving her information on computer discs to take home with her the next day. Something More? - However, Bhutto will later remark: “They gave me a bag of materials. Kim said the teams each side selected would do the deal, whatever the deal was to be. I really had little idea of what they were discussing. I did wonder, though. Was it only missiles? They said it was to be a cash deal.” Bhutto will also say that General Khawaja Ziauddin, a close associate of Khan, was in charge of the deal for the Pakistanis. Framed? - When Bhutto returns to Pakistan, she meets with one of her aides, Husein Haqqani, and shows him the bag of materials. Haqqani will later comment: “They could have been anything. It horrified me and I said so. She sensed then that the military had framed her. Her fingerprints were all over whatever their plan was for North Korea.” Bhutto gives the bag to Ziauddin, but will later say: “As far as I knew, the deal involved buying No-dong missiles for cash. But when I requested more information, the military clammed up.” After this trip, Bhutto is apparently not closely involved in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and is even unable to obtain information about its budget. [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 247-249]

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. [Source: FBI]Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a high-level al-Qaeda operative from Tanzania suspected of participating in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa, is captured in Gujrat, Pakistan, after a violent standoff with Pakistani police. [CNN, 8/3/2004] Ghailani’s arrest is publicly announced on July 29, four days later. The announcement by Pakistan’s Interior Minister Faisal Hayat is made in an unusual late-night press conference that takes place just hours before John Kerry accepts the Democratic nomination for president. [Salon, 8/17/2004] Pakistani authorities say the announcement of Ghailani’s arrest was delayed four days because of the need to confirm his identity before making the proclamation. [BBC, 7/30/2004] But former Pakistani official Husain Haqqani later claims the announcement was timed to upstage the Kerry speech. [Salon, 8/17/2004; United States Conference on International Religious Freedom, 6/30/2005] An article in the New Republic published earlier in the month reported that the Bush administration was asking Pakistan to make high-profile arrests of al-Qaeda suspects during the Democratic National Convention in order to redirect US media attention from the nomination of John Kerry (see July 8, 2004). [New Republic, 7/29/2004] John Judis, who co-wrote the article predicting such an arrest, says the day after the arrest is announced, “Well, the latest development pretty much confirms what we wrote in the article, which is that there was pressure for Pakistan to produce a high-value target during the last 10 days of July and to announce that arrest.” He also asks why is it “they announced [the arrest] at all? Because when you have somebody who’s been in hiding since 1998, they have an enormous amount of information and contacts. By announcing this guy’s arrest, what you do is you warn off everybody who’s been associated with him from the last five or six years. You tell them that they better get their act together or they are going to be found. So, there’s some, really a lot of questions of why they announced this thing when they did.… It may be in this case that we—that we, and the Pakistanis got somebody and prematurely announced this person’s arrest in order to have an electoral impact.” [Democracy Now!, 7/30/2004]

Former Pakistani government official Husain Haqqani says that Pakistan, not the US government, may have originally leaked the news to the international press that Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, an al-Qaeda operative turned informant for the US and Pakistan, was a double agent (see August 2, 2004). The leak of Khan’s identity ruins his capability to provide information about al-Qaeda and allows senior al-Qaeda operatives to escape arrest. Haqqani writes that there are two possible reasons for Pakistan’s decision to leak such damaging information: either Pakistani officials were eager to demonstrate their success in penetrating al-Qaeda, or, more likely, that Pakistan wanted to curb the inroads being made into al-Qaeda in order to keep the terrorist group safe and functional. A second leak, from Pakistani intelligence officials like the first, fingered US officials for the leak. The US government accepted the responsibility for outing Khan because, Haqqani writes, administration officials were complicit in the leak, and because the Bush administration is involved in a twisted, mutually duplicitous relationship with the Musharraf regime of Pakistan: “ostensibly driven by the mutual desire for security, there is clearly a political element to the relationship related to the survival of both the Bush and the Musharraf governments.” [Salon, 8/17/2004] On August 6, 2004, former President Bill Clinton accused the Bush administration of essentially contracting out US security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan in its zeal to wage war in Iraq (see August 6, 2004). One consequence of the decision to subcontract the hunt for members of al-Qaeda to Pakistan is that the terrorists appear to be regrouping and regaining in strength. [Washington Post, 8/14/2004] Haqqani believes that the two have mutual political concerns: while Pakistan cooperates, to a point, in hunting down al-Qaeda members, the government of Pervez Musharraf is more secure. In return, Pakistani officials, known for their reticence, have lately been unusually forthcoming in issuing well-timed reports designed to help Bush’s re-election efforts. For instance, on July 29, just hours before John Kerry’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Pakistan’s interior minister, Faisal Hayat, held an unusual late-night press conference announcing the arrest of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the man wanted for the 1998 terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (see July 25-29, 2004). [Salon, 8/17/2004]

Protesters in Kabul burn Florida pastor Terry Jones in effigy during a protest against Jones’s announced plans to burn a Koran on September 11. [Source: Musadeq Sadeq / Associated Press]Spokespersons for 11 nations with large Muslim populations speak out against Florida pastor Terry Jones’s announced plans to burn a Koran in commemoration of the 9/11 attacks (see July 12, 2010 and After and September 9, 2010). The Christian Science Monitor has reported: “Muslims see [the Koran] as the uninterrupted, unchangeable, and eternal word of God. Burning the Koran is akin to directly burning the word of God.” India’s Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, says: “We condemn the action of the pastor. It is totally unbecoming of anyone who claims to be a man of religion. We hope that the US authorities will take strong action to prevent such an outrage being committed.… While we await the action of the US authorities, we would appeal to the media in India—both print and visual media—to refrain from telecasting visuals or publishing photographs of the deplorable act.” Fourteen percent of Indian citizens are Muslim. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appeals to US President Obama to stop the burning (see September 10, 2010). “Indonesia and the US are building or bridging relations between the Western world and Islam,” Yudhoyono writes in a letter to Obama. “If the Koran burning occurs, then those efforts will be useless.” Eighty-six percent of Indonesia’s population is Muslim, and it is the world’s most populous Islamic nation. Bahrain’s foreign minister issues a statement that calls the planned Koran-burning a “shameful act which is incompatible with the principles of tolerance and coexistence.” Bahrain is over 80 percent Muslim. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari calls the plan to burn the Koran “despicable,” saying in a statement that “anyone who even thought of such a despicable act must be suffering from a diseased mind and a sickly soul.… It will inflame sentiments among Muslims throughout the world and cause irreparable damage to interfaith harmony and also to world peace.” Zardari calls “for doing all that it takes to stop such a senseless and outrageous act.” Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Husein Haqqani, tells a reporter that “the United States should live up to its high ideals and all these people who are against religious extremism and intolerance in the Muslim world should also speak up against meaningless gestures such as burning the Koran.” He also calls on Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck to speak out against the burning: “I think it would help if Mr. Glenn Beck came out against it, and said that people of faith do not burn the books of people of other faith,” Haqqani says. Some 95 percent of Pakistanis are Muslims. (The Pakistani English-language newspaper Dawn compares Jones to Osama bin Laden, calling both “extremists.”) British Prime Minister David Cameron says through a spokesman that “primarily this is an issue for the US, but clearly the government’s view is that we would not condone the burning of any book.… We would strongly oppose any attempt to offend any member of any religious or ethnic group. We are committed to religious tolerance.” Former Prime Minister Tony Blair also condemns the plan, saying: “I deplore the act of burning the Koran. It is disrespectful, wrong, and will be widely condemned by people of all faiths and none. You do not have to be a Muslim to share a sense of deep concern at such a disrespectful way to treat the Holy Book of Islam. Rather than burn the Koran, I would encourage people to read it.” Some 1.3 million British citizens are Muslims. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says: “I unequivocally condemn it. We all enjoy freedom of religion and that freedom of religion comes from a tolerant spirit.… I don’t speak very often about my own religion, but let me be very clear: My God and my Christ is a tolerant God, and that’s what we want to see in this world. I don’t think that’s the way you treat other faiths, as different as those faiths may be from your own.” Canadian Defense Minister Peter Mackay, echoing sentiments expressed by General David Petraeus (see September 6, 2010), says that the burning could endanger NATO troops overseas: “It will incite further violence and hatred and I’m concerned that this will put Canadians and other ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] soldiers in harm’s way.” Some 500,000 Canadians practice Islam. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman says: “That is the most heinous crime and action, it’s unthinkable. There is no doubt whatsoever that it is an attack on Muslims. It will not only anger the Muslims in Malaysia and throughout the world—Christians also don’t condone this kind of action.… I believe America will take appropriate action so this thing will not happen.” Malaysia has a Muslim majority of 15.5 million. Lebanese President Michel Suleiman says in a statement: “The president condemns the announcement of a religious group in the United States of its intention to openly burn copies of the Koran. It is a clear contradiction of the teachings of the three Abrahamic religions and of dialogue among the three faiths [Christianity, Islam and Judaism].” Lebanon is about 60 percent Muslim. Amr Moussa, the chief of the 22-nation Arab League, calls Jones a “fanatic” and calls on the US to oppose his “destructive approach.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel says, “If a fundamentalist, evangelical pastor in America wants to burn the Koran on September 11, then I find this simply disrespectful, even abhorrent and simply wrong.” Brigadier General Hans-Werner Fritz, commander of German troops in Afghanistan, adds, “I only wish this wouldn’t happen, because it would provide a trigger for violence towards all ISAF troops, including the Germans in northern Afghanistan.” Germany has over 3 million practicing Muslims. A Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry official says, “This bizarre plan… undermines our faith [and] is a flagrant insult to the feelings of Muslims worldwide and would ruin efforts to preach understanding amongst faiths.” The official says that Kuwait has asked its ambassador to the US to coordinate with other Arab and Muslim envoys to ensure that the “tolerant Islamic faith is respected.” The head of Kuwait’s Christian churches league, pastor Emmanuel Benjamen al-Ghareeb, also condemns the plan in a statement and stresses it does not represent Christ’s teachings of tolerance. Kuwait’s 2.7 million population is 85 percent Muslim. The Vatican issues a condemnation of the burning, saying through the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Affairs: “These deplorable acts of violence, in fact, cannot be counteracted by an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community.… Each religion, with its respective sacred books, places of worship and symbols, has the right to respect and protection. We are speaking about the respect to be accorded the dignity of the person who is an adherent of that religion and his/her free choice in religious matters.” The Vatican, technically the world’s smallest country with a population of 800, is, presumably, all Roman Catholic. The Vatican is joined by several US Christian organizations in condemning the proposed Koran-burning (see September 8-9, 2010). [Christian Science Monitor, 9/9/2010] Jones is burned in effigy in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, in one of a number of protests around the world against his plans to burn a Koran. [Gainesville Sun, 9/11/2010]

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